As It Was Left

It's a lot quieter around here during the day, with the kids back in school. Sometimes there are brief explosions of activity, like yesterday when I came home from buying cat food and guinea pig litter to find Ron home for lunch, the local roofer parking his truck right behind me, and the Orkin guy pulling in behind him. Ron finished lunch and took off, the roofer climbed around on the roof and promised to send me an estimate, and the Orkin guy sprayed for wasps around the deck and then left. Once it was quiet again, the birds gave some experimental chirps, just to see.

Since I work at home some days, I'm awfully good at blocking out what it looks like, at least when I have interesting things to do like try to schedule forty students to work at times that will fit into the rest of their frenzied schedules. Sometimes, though, I come into a room and think of this Philip Larkin poem, Home is so Sad:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.